Written by Jonathan Wojcik

Six cute things from Kirkland's 2016

Kirkland's is a retail chain that's existed for a fairly long time, but I personally only discovered it about two years ago on one of my Maryland trips. Selling things like furniture, wall decor and fancy yard ornaments, it seems to offer some interesting Halloween items every year, and this year, had a lot more worth my attention than usual!

Skeleton Shelf-Sitter Couple

If you've ever seen a more beautiful pair of lovers in your entire miserable time on this dirtball, then I want to know how you watched a pair of angels going at it without being driven to madness. Hat Skeleton's best features are its giant eyeballs and nefarious grin, while Bow Skeleton's best features are its lopsided egg-shaped skull and the fact that the bow is screwed into the bone. That's not a mistake or any missing piece, they had a dozen of these figures and every single one had that single, protruding screw through the bow. That is such an unnecessary but ingeniously funny detail.

ANOTHER Mummy is Watching...or is it?

If you read my review of Michael's merchandise a couple pages back, you saw TWO completely different "Mummy is Watching" signs already, one of them very, very similar to this one. The key difference is that of the three, this mummy has no visible eyes, and it makes the message all the more ominous. Without exposed eyeballs, we're left assuming that this mummy sees by purely supernatural means. It is watching always, everywhere, wherever you are. No wall can hide your foul deeds from this mummy, or from the accusatory stare of its spider friend.

Bow Spider Sign

This is a big, flat, hanging burlap decoration of a cartoon spider with a bow, and it is adorable. In popular culture, a hair bow is the go-to means of denoting a character design as "female," and while anyone in the real world can rock a good bow, I do appreciate the sentiment that this fanged arachnid is a girl. When I was a kid, you almost never saw a spider like this with a "girly" angle unless it was also bright pink, and even that was rare as hell, because every marketing department was under the strict impression that boys shunned pink and girls shunned bugs. We've come a long way.

BOO Y'ALL

Boo Y'all.

Deranged Wreathe Witch

I swear I tried to photograph this thing from every angle I could without drawing an embarrassing amount of attention to myself, and this was still the best result. This is a jet black, prickly wreathe adorned with sparkly, swirly spheres, a witch's hat, and a pair of legs with striped socks. I've seen a LOT of witch hats with legs these past few years, but never one with a swirling vortex of burnt pine needles for a body. This is like something out of that Madokus anime. I love this as an actual "character design" and I refuse to interpret it as anything other than an entire witch that literally looks this way.

Frankenstein's Monster as a Jar as a Wooden Sign

This is one of those things you might glance at, find a little cute at most, and probably put out of your mind within minutes...but hold that thought, and you're rewarded with an escalating level of confusion and delight. This is Tropius all over again, an item with exactly three elements and exactly one too many.

Think about it: Frankenstein's Monster as a wooden sign, a wooden sign shaped like a jar, or Frankenstein's Monster as a jar would all be ordinary, forgettable Halloween decorations, but some twisted madman once again decided to push things a step too far. What would the actual PURPOSE of this sign ever be, except perhaps to advertise some kind of monster head pickling service?